time is money, and if he is alternately able to leave his place of business and his place of pleasure half an hour later each way, he is all the better pleased with both. To speculators in want of an idea I would say: Rush to the Clyde, and buy up every inch of land that can be had within a mile of the water, build upon it, and from the half million of human beings who tenant Glasgow and the surrounding towns I will engage to find two competing occupants for every house that can be put up. Building has progressed even in Arran, and this too in despite of the late Duke of Hamilton’s dislike to strangers, so that there is now a population on the island of about 6000. A friend of mine says that such an important entity as a duke has no right to do as he likes with his own, and consequently that Arran ought to be built upon, and the blackcocks and other game birds be left to take their chance. Even with such limited accommodation as can be now obtained, Arran is a delightful summer residence; were it to be generally built upon, it would realise from ground-rents alone an annual fortune to his Grace the Duke of Hamilton, who owns the greater part of it, and he might have capital shooting into the bargain. Arran, I may state to all who are ignorant of the fact, is a very paradise for geologists; and amateur globe-makers—persons who think they are better at constructing worlds than the Great Architect who preceded them all—are particularly fond of that island, being, as they suppose, quite able to find upon it _materiel_ sufficient for the erection of the largest possible “theories.” Figures, it is said, can be made to prove either side of a cause; so can stones. Each geologist can build up his own pet world from the same set of rocks; and so active geologists proceed to stucco over with their own compositions—“adumbrate” a friend calls the process—the sublime works of the greatest of all designers. None of the sciences have given rise to so much controversy as the science of geology. I make no pretensions to much geologic knowledge, although I do know a little more than the man who wondered if the granite boulders which he saw on a brae-side were on their way up or down the hill, and argued that it was a moot point. What I would like to see would be a good work on geology, divested entirely of the learned and scientific slang which usually make such books entirely useless to ninety-nine out of every hundred persons who attempt to read them. I would like, moreover, a work that would not bully us with a ready-made theory.